Marxism and Revisionism

Written:Written not later than April 3 (16), 1908Published:Published in 1908 in the symposiumKarl Marx—1818-1883. Signed:Vl. Ilyin.

      Published according to the symposium.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1973,

      Moscow,Volume 15,

      pages29-39.Translated:Transcription:ZodiacHTML Markup:B. BagginsandD. WaltersPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      marx.org 1996; marxists.org 1999

      (1996).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Thereis a well-known saying that if geometrical axioms
affected human interests attempts would certainly be made to refute
them. Theories of natural history which conflicted with the old prejudices
of theology provoked, and still provoke, the most rabid opposition. No
wonder, therefore, that the Marxian doctrine, which directly serves to
enlighten and organise the advanced class in modern society, indicates the
tasks facing this class and demonstrates the inevitable replacement (by
virtue of economic development) of the present system by a new order—no
wonder that this doctrine has had to fight for every step forward in the
course of its life.

Needlessto say, this applies to bourgeois science and philosophy,
officially taught by official professors in order to befuddle the rising
generation of the propertied classes and to “coach” it against internal
and foreign enemies. This science will not even hear of Marxism, declaring
that it has been refuted and annihilated. Marx is attacked with equal zest
by young scholars who are making a career by refuting socialism, and by
decrepit elders who are preserving the tradition of all kinds of outworn
“systems”. The progress of Marxism, the fact that its ideas are spreading
and taking firm hold among the working class, inevitably increase the
frequency and intensity of these bourgeois attacks on Marxism, which
becomes stronger, more hardened and more vigorous every time it is
“annihilated” by official science.

Buteven among doctrines connected with the struggle of the working
class, and current mainly among the proletariat, Marxism by no means
consolidated its position all at once. In the first half-century of its
existence (fromthe 1840s on) Marxism was engaged in combating theories fundamentally
hostile to it. In the early forties Marx and Engels settled accounts with
the radical Young Hegelians whose viewpoint was that of philosophical
idealism. At the end of the forties the struggle began in the field of
economic doctrine, against Proudhonism. The fifties saw the completion of
this struggle in criticism of the parties and doctrines which manifested
themselves in the stormy year of 1848. In the sixties the struggle shifted
from the field of general theory to one closer to the direct labour
movement: the ejection of Bakuninism from the International. In the early
seventies the stage in Germany was occupied for a short while by the
Proudhonist Mühlberger, and in the late seventies by the positivist
Dühring. But the influence of both on the proletariat was already
absolutely insignificant. Marxism was already gaining an unquestionable
victory over all other ideologies in the labour movement.

Bythe nineties this victory was in the main completed. Even in the
Latin countries, where the traditions of Proudhonism held their ground
longest of all, the workers’ parties in effect built their programmes and
their tactics on Marxist foundations. The revived international
organisation of the labour movement—in the shape of periodical
international congresses—from the outset, and almost without a struggle,
adopted the Marxist standpoint in all essentials. But after Marxism had
ousted all the more or less integral doctrines hostile to it, the
tendencies expressed in those doctrines began to seek other channels. The
forms and causes of the struggle changed, but the struggle continued. And
the second half-century of the existence of Marxism began (in the nineties)
with the struggle of a trend hostile to Marxism within Marxism itself.

Bernstein,a one-time orthodox Marxist, gave his name to this trend by
coming forward with the most noise and with the most purposeful expression
of amendments to Marx, revision of Marx, revisionism. Even in Russia
where—owing to the economic backwardness of the country and the
preponderance of a peasant population weighed down by the relics of
serfdom—non-Marxist socialism has naturally held its ground longest of
all, it is plainly passing intorevisionism before our very eyes. Both in the agrarian question (the
programme of the municipalisation of all land) and in general questions of
programme and tactics, our Social-Narodniks are more and more substituting
“amendments” to Marx for the moribund and obsolescent remnants of their
old system, which in its own way was integral and fundamentally hostile to
Marxism.

Pre-Marxistsocialism has been defeated. It is continuing the struggle,
no longer on its own independent ground, but on the general ground of
Marxism, as revisionism. Let us, then, examine the ideological content of
revisionism.

Inthe sphere of philosophy revisionism followed in the wake of
bourgeois professorial “science”. The professors went “back to
Kant"—and revisionism dragged along after the neo-Kantians. The
professors repeated the platitudes that priests have uttered a thousand
times against philosophical materialism—and the revisionists, smiling
indulgently, mumbled (word for word after the latestHandbuch)
that materialism had been “refuted” long ago. The professors treated
Hegel as a

“dead dog”,[2]and while themselves preaching idealism, only an
idealism a thousand times more petty and banal than Hegel’s,
contemptuously shrugged their shoulders at dialectics—and the
revisionists floundered after them into the swamp of philosophical
vulgarisation of science, replacing “artful” (and revolutionary)
dialectics by “simple" (and tranquil) “evolution”. The professors earned
their official salaries by adjusting both their idealist and their
“critical” systems to the dominant medieval “philosophy” (i.e., to
theology)—and the revisionists drew close to them, trying to make
religion a “private affair”, not in relation to the modern state, but in
relation to the party of the advanced class.

Whatsuch “amendments” to Marx really meant in class terms need not
be stated: it is self-evident. We shall simply note that the only Marxist
in the international Social-Democratic movement to criticise the incredible
platitudes of the revisionists from the standpoint of consistent
dialectical materialism was Plekhanov. This must be stressed. all the more
emphatically since profoundly mistaken attempts are being made at the
present time to smuggle inold and reactionary philosophical rubbish disguised as a criticism of
Plekhanov’s tactical

			     opportunism.[1]

Passingto political economy, it must be noted first of all that in
this sphere the “amendments” of the revisionists were much more
comprehensive and circumstantial; attempts were made to influence the
public by “new data on economic development”. It was said that
concentration and the ousting of small-scale production by large-scale
production do not occur in agriculture at all, while they proceed very
slowly in commerce and industry. It was said that crises had now become
rarer and weaker, and that cartels and trusts would probably enable capital
to eliminate them altogether. It was said that the “theory of collapse”
to which capitalism is heading was unsound, owing to the tendency of class
antagonisms to become milder and less acute. It was said, finally, that it
would not be amiss to correct Marx’s theory of value, too, in
accordance with

Böhm-Bawerk.[3]

Thefight against the revisionists on these questions resulted in as
fruitful a revival of the theoretical thought in international socialism as
did Engels’s controversy with Dühring twenty years earlier. The
arguments of the revisionists were analysed with the help of facts and
figures. It was proved that the revisionists were systematically painting a
rose-coloured picture of modern small-scale production. The technical and
commercial superiority of large-scaleproductionover small-scale
production not only in industry, but also in agriculture, is proved by
irrefutable facts. But commodity production is far less developed in
agriculture, and modern statisticians and economists are, as a rule, not
very skilful in picking out the special branches (sometimes even the
operations) in agriculture which indicate that agriculture is being
progressively drawn into the process ofexchangein world
economy. Small-scale productionmaintains itself on the ruins of natural economy by constant worsening of
diet, by chronic starvation, by lengthening of the working day, by
deterioration in the quality and the care of cattle, in a word, by the very
methods whereby handicraft production maintained itself against capitalist
manufacture. Every advance in science and technology inevitably and
relentlessly undermines the foundations of small-scale production in
capitalist society; and it is the task of socialist political economy to
investigate this process in all its forms, often complicated and intricate,
and to demonstrate to the small producer the impossibility of his holding
his own under capitalism, the hopelessness of peasant farming under
capitalism, and the necessity for the peasant to adopt the standpoint of
the proletarian. On this question the revisionists sinned, in the
scientific sense, by superficial generalisations based on facts selected
one-sidedly and without reference to the system of capitalism as a
whole. From the political point of view, they sinned by the fact that they
inevitably, whether they wanted to or not, invited or urged the peasant to
adopt the attitude of a small proprietor (i.e., the attitude of the
bourgeoisie) instead of urging him to adopt the point of view of the
revolutionary proletarian.

Theposition of revisionism was even worse as regards the theory of
crises and the theory of collapse. Only for a very short time could people,
and then only the most short-sighted, think of refashioning the foundations
of Marx’s theory under the influence of a few years of industrial
boom and prosperity. Realities very soon made it clear to the revisionists
that crises were not a thing of the past: prosperity was followed by a
crisis. The forms, the sequence, the picture of particular crises changed,
but crises remained an inevitable component of the capitalist system. While
uniting production, the cartels and trusts at the same time, and in a way
that was obvious to all, aggravated the anarchy of production, the
insecurity of existence of the proletariat and the oppression of capital,
thereby intensifying class antagonisms to an unprecedented degree. That
capitalism is heading for a break-down—in the sense both of individual
political and economic crises and of the complete collapse of the entire
capitalist system—hasbeen made particularly clear, and on a particularly large scale, precisely
by the new giant trusts. The recent financial crisis in America and the
appalling increase of unemployment all over Europe, to say nothing of the
impending industrial crisis to which many symptoms are pointing—all this
has resulted in the recent “theories” of the revisionists having been
forgotten by everybody, including, apparently, many of the revisionists
themselves. But the lessons which this instability of the intellectuals had
given the working class must not be forgotten.

Asto the theory of value, it need only be said that apart from the
vaguest of hints and sighs,à laBöhm-Bawerk, the
revisionists have contributed absolutely nothing, and have therefore left
no traces whatever on the development of scientific thought.

Inthe sphere of politics, revisionism did really try to revise the
foundation of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the class
struggle. Political freedom, democracy and universal suffrage remove the
ground for the class struggle—we were told—and render untrue the old
proposition of theCommunist Manifestothat the working men have
no country. For, they said, since the “will of the majority” prevails in
a democracy, one must neither regard the state as an organ of class rule,
nor reject alliances with the progressive, social-reform bourgeoisie
against the reactionaries.

Itcannot be disputed that these arguments of the revisionists amounted
to a fairly well-balanced system of views, namely, the old and well-known
liberal-bourgeois views. The liberals have always said that bourgeois
parliamentarism destroys classes and class divisions, since the right to
vote and the right to participate in the government of the country are
shared by all citizens without distinction. The whole history of Europe in
the second half of the nineteenth century, and the whole history of the
Russian revolution in the early twentieth, clearly show how absurd such
views are. Economic distinctions are not mitigated but aggravated and
intensified under the freedom of “democratic” capitalism. Parliamentarism
does not eliminate, but lays bare the innate character even of the most
democratic bourgeois republics as organs of class oppression. By helping to
enlighten and to organise immeasurably widermasses of the population than those which previously took an active part in
political events, parliamentarism does not make for the elimination of
crises and political revolutions, but for the maximum intensification of
civil war during such revolutions. The events in Paris in the spring of
1871 and the events in Russia in the winter of 1905 showed as clearly as
could be how inevitably this intensification comes about. The French
bourgeoisie without a moment’s hesitation made a deal with the enemy
of the whole nation, with the foreign army which had ruined its country, in
order to crush the proletarian movement. Whoever does not understand the
inevitable inner dialectics of parliamentarism and bourgeois
democracy—which leads to an even sharper decision of the argument by mass
violence than formerly—will never be able on the basis of this
parliamentarism to conduct propaganda and agitation consistent in
principle, really preparing the working-class masses for victorious
participation in such “arguments”. The experience of alliances,
agreements and blocs with the social-reform liberals in the West and with
the liberal reformists (Cadets) in the Russian revolution, has convincingly
shown that these agreements only blunt the consciousness of the masses,
that they do not enhance but weaken the actual significance of their
struggle, by linking fighters with elements who are least capable of
fighting and most vacillating and treacherous. Millerandism in France—the
biggest experiment in applying revisionist political tactics on a wide, a
really national scale—has provided a practical appraisal of revisionism
that will never be forgotten by the proletariat all over the world.

Anatural complement to the economic and political tendencies of
revisionism was its attitude to the ultimate aim of the socialist
movement. “The movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing"—this
catch-phrase of Bernstein’s expresses the substance of revisionism
better than many long disquisitions. To determine its conduct from case to
case, to adapt itself to the events of the day and to the chopping and
changing of petty politics, to forget the primary interests of the
proletariat and the basic features of the whole capitalist system, of all
capitalist evolution, to sacrifice these primary interests for thereal or assumed advantages of the moment—such is the policy of
revisionism. And it patently follows from the very nature of this policy
that it may assume an infinite variety of forms, and that every more or
less “new” question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of
events, even though it change the basic line of development only to an
insignificant degree and only for the briefest period, will always
inevitably give rise to one variety of revisionism or another.

Theinevitability of revisionism is determined by its class roots in
modern society. Revisionism is an international phenomenon. No thinking
socialist who is in the least informed can have the slightest doubt that
the relation between the orthodox and the Bernsteinians in Germany, the
Guesdists and the Jaurèsists (and now particularly the Broussists)
in France, the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour
Party in Great Britain, Brouckère and Vandervelde in Belgium, the
Integralists and the Reformists in Italy, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks
in Russia, is everywhere essentially similar, notwithstanding the immense
variety of national conditions and historical factors in the present state
of all these countries. In reality, the “division” within the present
international socialist movement is now proceeding along thesamelines in all the various countries of the world, which testifies to a
tremendous advance compared with thirty or forty years ago, when
heterogeneous trends in the various countries were struggling within the
one international socialist movement. And that “revisionism from the
left” which has taken shape in the Latin countries as

“revolutionary syndicalism”,[4]is also adapting itself to Marxism,
“amending” it: Labriola in Italy and Lagardelle in France frequently
appeal from Marx who is understood wrongly to Marx who is understood
rightly.

Wecannot stop here to analyse the ideological content ofthisrevisionism, which as yet is far from having developed to the same extent
as opportunist revisionism: it has not yet become international, has not
yet stood the test of a single big practical battle with a socialist party
in any single country. We confine ourselves therefore to that “revisionism
from the right” which was described above.

Whereinlies its inevitability in capitalist society? Why is it more
profound than the differences of national peculiarities and of degrees of
capitalist development? Because in every capitalist country, side by side
with the proletariat, there are always broad strata of the petty
bourgeoisie, small proprietors. Capitalism arose and is constantly arising
out of small production. A number of new “middle strata” are inevitably
brought into existence again and again by capitalism (appendages to the
factory, work at home, small workshops scattered all over the country to
meet the requirements of big industries, such as the bicycle and automobile
industries, etc.). These new small producers are just as inevitably being
cast again into the ranks of the proletariat. It is quite natural that the
petty-bourgeois world-outlook should again and again crop up in the ranks
of the broad workers’ parties. It is quite natural that this should be so
and always will be so, right up to the changes of fortune that will take
place in the proletarian revolution. For it would be a profound mistake to
think that the “complete” proletarianisation of the majority of the
population is essential for bringing about such a revolution. What we now
frequently experience only in the domain of ideology, namely, disputes over
theoretical amendments to Marx; what now crops up in practice only over
individual side issues of the labour movement, as tactical differences with
the revisionists and splits on this basis—is bound to be experienced by
the working class on an incomparably larger scale when the proletarian
revolution will sharpen all disputed issues, will focus all differences on
points which are of the most immediate importance in determining the
conduct of the masses, and will make it necessary in the heat of the fight
to distinguish enemies from friends, and to cast out bad allies in order to
deal decisive blows at the enemy.

Theideological struggle waged by revolutionary Marxism against
revisionism at the end of the nineteenth century is but the prelude to the
great revolutionary battles of the proletariat, which is marching forward
to the complete victory of its cause despite all the waverings and
weaknesses of the petty bourgeoisie.

[1]SeeStudies in the Philosophy of Marxismby Bogdanov, Bazarov
and others. This is not the place to discuss the book, and I must at
present confine myself to stating that in the very near future I shall
prove in a series of articles, or in a separate pamphlet, thateverythingI have said in the text about neo-Kantian revisionists
essentially applies also to these “new” neo-Humist and neo-Berkeleyan
revisionists. (See present edition, Vol. 14.—Ed.)  —Lenin

[2]Leninquotes from K. Marx’s afterword to the second edition of
Volume One ofCapital(see K. Marx and F. Engels,Selected
Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 456).

[3]Böhm-Bawerk, E.—an Austrian bourgeois economist.

[4]“Revolutionarysyndicalism"— a petty-bourgeois
semi-anarchist trend that made its appearance in the labour movement of a
number of West-European countries at the close of the nineteenth century.

Thesyndicalists saw no need for the working class to engage in
political struggle, they repudiated the leading role of the Party and the
dictatorship of the proletariat. They believed that by organising a general
strike of the workers the trade unions (in France—syndicats) could,
without a revolution, overthrow capitalism and take over control of
production.